A blog covering all aspects of ICT Enhanced Learning and Teaching (ICTELT) where the focus lies on ways of scaffolding and empowering learners.
I am a strong advocate of the potential of Web 2.0 and social learning to empower learners from all walks of life and cultures.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Motivation, agency and purpose

Our department is just about to have it's strategic planning day, so I've been doing some thinking and research around what works with individuals and teams, and came across this really thought-provoking TED talks video by Dan Pink: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html.

One of the key notions Pink discusses is that extrinsic motivation only works with tasks with a low cognitive load, whereas creative, right brain tasks require intrinsic motivation. Motivation is also enhanced by a clear sense of purpose. Pink's argument is that business is being run on a model that has been proven by research that it doesn't work (reward), and that it needs to shift to a model that supports and enables creative motivation, trust, and teamwork. After watching his video, I went away convinced, and will now have to begin a quest to shape my own working environment as Pink recommends :-)

"Dan Pink, once a speechwriter for Al Gore, is now a career analyst beginning a revolution in the workplaces of the world. This morning at TEDGlobal he begins by noting that a little over 20 years ago, he did something that he regrets. He went to law school. He didn’t do very well. Pink jokes that he graduated in the part of his class that made the top 90 percent possible. He never practiced law a day in his life as he wasn’t allowed to. But today, against his better judgment, he says, he wants to use some of those legal skills. He wants to make a case for rethinking how we run our businesses.

Pink shows a slide title "The candle problem," a psychological experiment created by Karl Duncker in 1935. A person is brought into a room and given a candle, a box of thumbtacks and matches and asked to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax doesn’t drip on to the table. The person who can solve the candle problem is one who, rather than seeing the box as receptacle for the tacks, sees it as something that can be used in the solution. The box is tacked to the wall and the candle placed on it.

This experiment is used to learn about incentives, Pink explains. Two groups of people are offered the problem -- the first group is simply timed and the second group is offered rewards. It takes the second group three and and a half minutes longer than the first group, on average, to solve the problem. "That’s not how its suposed to wrk! I’m an American. Incentives work!" Pink exclaims. But, he says, this experiment has shown that incentives actually dull thinking and block creativity and he notes that this is not an aberration. It’s been shown over and over again. It’s one of the most robust findings in social science and also one of the most ignored. There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.

Another experiment was done with the problem presented in a slightly different way. Th tacks were taken out of the box, and then the incentivzed group did much better than the other. Pink says this is because it’s an easy problem. For these types of tasks of narrow focus, where you can see the goal right there, rewards work really well.

However, he points out that around the world, white collar workers are doing less of this second type of work and more of the first. Narrow tasks have become fairly easy to outsource and to automate and right-brain conceptual tasks have become more important. Everybody in this room, Pink says, is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. And for those people the if-then rewards don’t work. "This is not a feeling. I'm a lawyer, I have no feelings. This is not a philosophy. I'm an American, I don't believe in philosophy," he says. This is a fact, Pink asserts.

He draws on the a study by Dan Ariely and his colleagues. Ariely et al found that once the given task in one of these experiments was only a mechanical skill, rewards would mean better performance, but if any rudimentary cognitive skill was needed, a larger reward would mean a worse performance. The study was retested in India to control for cultural differences and they found got the same results. Studies at the London School of Economics have also found that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on performance.

So, Pink says, to get out of the messes of the 20th century, we don't need to do more of the wrong things. We need a new approach, one that includes three basic elements: Autonomy, mastery and purpose. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system. Today, he says he's going to talk about autonomy. The traditional notions of management are great if you only want compliance, he explains. But for creative thinking, we have to approach things differently.

He points to the software company Atlassian -- a few times a year, they tell their engineers to go off for 24 hours and work on anything that is not their regular job. Then they all come back together and present their work. They call these Fedex days, because they have to deliver something overnight. Atlasssian has taken also implemented the 20 percent time rule that Google has, where employees can take that 20 percent of their time at work to work on whatever they want. Pink says that about half of Google's products have come from that time.

Pink also advocates results only work environments (ROWE) where there are no schedules, people don't have to work in the office, employees can work wherever and whenever they want and meetings are optional. When companies implement ROWE policy, he says, productivity always goes up and turnover goes down.

For more evidence, he discusses two different models that were posed for creating a digital encyclopedia. The Microsoft model which included hiring researchers and experts and extensive planning, and the Wikipedia model where people would participate because they were interested. Pink asserts that 10 years ago, you could not have found two economists who would have said that the Wikipedia model would work better, but it does.

Science knows that motivators only work to solve narrow problems, Pink declares, but they destroy creativity. Maybe, he says, if we can increase productivity in solving the candle problems everywhere, we can change the world."

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About Me

I am an Education and eLearning Consultant with, and Director of, Ethos Consultancy NZ. I am also an experienced (virtual and face-to-face) coach and mentor (business and education sectors).

I have a keen
interest in all aspects of ICT enhanced learning and teaching where the focus lies on ways of scaffolding and empowering learners. In
particular, I am interested in the way that creative, blended
approaches to Professional Learning and Development can create trust,
rapport and encourage reflective practice. As such, learning is
approached from facilitation, design, evaluation and assessment as
opposed to the tools and what they can offer.

I am a strong advocate of the potential of Web 2.0 to empower
learners from all walks of life and cultures, especially after my
experiences working for 6 years in the Middle East. In particular, I am
interested how ePortfolios can be used in the Vocational Education and Training sector (especially
where Literacy and Language challenges are faced), in Recognition of
Prior Learning, and in authentic, applied assessment.

Following research informed approaches
and design, I apply a qualitative, iterative process to evaluate the
effectiveness of interventions, programmes and tools, encouraging
learners' voices and input from all stakeholders.